Madness

A Bipolar Life

When Marya Hornbacher published her acclaimed first book, Wasted: a memoir of anorexia and bulimia, she did not yet have a piece of shattering knowledge: the underlying reason for her distress. At age twenty-four, Hornbacher was diagnosed with Type I rapid-cycle bipolar, the most severe form of bipolar disease there is. In her wry and utterly self-revealing style, Hornbacher tells her new story in Madness. Through scenes of astonishing visceral and emotional power, she takes us inside her own desperate attempts to counteract violently careening mood swings by self-starvation, substance abuse, numbing sex, and self-mutilation. Her brave and heart-stopping memoir details her fight up from madness and describes what it is like to live in a difficult, sometimes beautiful life and marriage when the bipolar tendency always beckons.